Posted on 01/14/2004 10:18:37 AM PST by Destro
Tue 13 Jan 2004
12:45pm (UK)
Milosevic Bounces Back for Final Days of Prosecution
"PA"
A rejuvenated Slobodan Milosevic returned to court today and clashed with a former Voice of America reporter as UN prosecutors enter the final weeks of their attempt to prove the Serb leader committed war crimes.
The first witness after a three week holiday recess at the Yugoslav tribunal was reporter Nenad Zafirovic, whose testimony was intended to help link Milosevic to the Bosnian Serb leadership that ordered the massacre of over 7,000 Muslim men and boys in Srebrenica, eastern Bosnia, in 1995.
Milosevic, ousted as president of Serbia by a popular uprising in 2000, was elected to the Serbian parliament last month, but will not receive a seat because he is in United Nations detention for the duration of his trial.
After two years of hearings in The Hague, prosecutors have 17 days of hearings left to finish their case against Milosevic, accused of 66 counts of war crimes, including genocide, allegedly committed during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. A three month break will follow the prosecution’s case during which Milosevic is to prepare his defence.
Milosevic, who suffers heart trouble and high blood pressure, is defending himself and his trial has been delayed several times while he was sick. But he appeared fresh and combative today, grinning widely at one point after the presiding judge, Briton Richard May, accused him of “making speeches.”
Milosevic complained that his time for cross examination is being limited because prosecutors are “aware their time is running out and trying to push through witnesses with masses of accompanying material in great haste, topsy-turvy.”
“They’ve been wasting their time for two years, and now they’re under pressure,” Milosevic said.
In order to convict Milosevic of genocide in Bosnia, prosecutors must show that he had ultimate control over troops there, and failed to stop them from committing atrocities or punish them afterward. Milosevic denies having had power outside Serbia’s borders.
Zafirovic was a long-time anchor for Voice of America’s Serbian news service and recently worked for the BBC in Washington. During the early stages of the Balkan Wars, he was an employee of Belgrade-based radio station B-92.
Zafirovic attended peace negotiations in Geneva in 1993 and said he was interviewing Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic when Milosevic telephoned Karadzic.
“Officially, on the record, they would address him as Mr. President,” Zafirovic said of Milosevic. “In informal conversations he was referred to as the Big Boss, or Big Daddy.”
Zafirovic also recounted a closed session of the parliament of the breakaway Serb Republic in Bosnia he attended in 1993. He said Milosevic said “we, not you,” while addressing the Bosnian Serbs, indicating his close ties to leaders who oversaw the Srebrenica killings.
Zafirovic said that was noteworthy because in public Milosevic always maintained a distinction between Serbs in Bosnia and Serbia, “claiming that Serbia not involved in the war.”
Milosevic responded scornfully, “Oh great. Thank you very much for putting it this way. Since I’m a Serb, of course I sometimes say we, and when I criticise certain positions, of course I say you.”
Milosevic could be sentenced to up to life in prison if convicted of a single count.
Isn't it curious that the 100 million dollar men, Djindic & Kostunica , ordered their thugs to burn the ballots on Thursday, one day before the Supreme Court ruling was expected ?
A good example of this occurred in Kosovo - you're calling it "fuzzy math", on the part of DOS, when the simple facts of the case are that UNMIK monitored the voting stations and tallied 44,000 voters at the polls, yet Milosevic garnered 140,000 votes, leading to the conclusion that either each Kosovo vote was worth a little over 3 normal votes, or something was terribly amiss.
In the meantime, some 600,000 votes for Kostunica, as tallied by CeSID's monitoring of the polling stations (which were required to post their results locally at the same time they were sent up to Belgrade for tallying using "Milosevic math") simply disappeared, which, from what I can see of your post, simply isn't a concern - if Serbs get screwed by Milosevic, well no problem, leaving me wondering if you're just so inured to it by this point that it no longer registers with you.
And to cap it all off, here you are pushing some pap about the election requiring "judicial review". By whom? Why, by Milosevic's appointees, of course!
Idiocy. Plain and simple.
By whose estimates? Soros, or his paid subsidiaries?
Even without the Kosovo Serb votes, DOS barely made it over 50%. They were not comfortable with a re-count when a recount was clearly mandated. Have you already forgotten the last US election? GW won by a few hundred votes!
What if the Republicans claimed victory and then destroyed all the ballots before they could be recounted? Especially if a foreign government contributed the bulk of the election money? How would that be received? Not very well, so stop rationalizing.
The fact is that even $100M poured into the pockets of various Serbian quislings barely tipped the scale and that DOS started off on the same footing as Miloshevich -- using thugs like Legiya (bought with part of those $100M) and using paid thugs to break into ballot boxes and destroy the ballots.
DOS's criminal dealings, rigging parliament votes, and Miloshevich-style tactics by arresting 11,000 on "conspiracy" charges and trying to purge political opponents while at it, only show that the only "redeeming" feature about DOS was that it was willing to serve us and not the Serbian people.
The treasonous nature of DOS and other marginal politicians is manifested by people like Djindjich and Drashkovich who, shortly after the bombing of Serbia went to meet and bow before Madaleine Albright, something the Serbian people must never forgive them and hopefully Drashkovich will stand trial for that one day.
The DOS regime appointed Vesna Peshich, who could be considered the leader amongs those who can be called traitors, not counting Bilyana Plavshich in Bosnia, as ambassador to Mexico, and all the leading positions (Natasha Michich, Goran Svilanovich, etc.) were from the same Peshich's party that can only be described as politically marginal and insignificant. Along with Djindjich, whose popularity ran at about 6% most of the time, these marginal foreign-bought puppets, working for foreign interests that see good Serbia only as weak Serbia, were ready to send S&MG troops to die uselessly in Iraq just to show how obedient the DOS regime is to Washington, and were selling off Serbia's meger assets to westerns for nothing in the grand style of Russian "reformers" of the Yeltsin era.
They are a collection of scum bags who will one day pay for their treason, take note, Serbs don't forgive and don't forget.
Milosevic screwed the Serbs for over a decade, and when he finally pushed his luck too far in September of 2000 where his attempt to steal yet another election blew up in his face, Vojislav Kostunica was the bad guy?
Serbs don't forgive and don't forget.
To quote Mr. Kostunica, addressing Slobodan Milosevic supporters who assaulted him in Kosovo Mitrovica prior to the election, "God will forgive you, but God will not forgive him", so it appears you've been trumped on that count.
He also referred to Milosevic as having put them up to their antics, and it's looking more like a case of et tu, Kosta? with each idiotic post in your litany of shame - it would appear that either a Serbian politician is from the indicted for crimes lunatic not-so-fringe or they are traitors (in your eyes).
Whatever - no evidence will suffice to sway you. If it goes against your notions, as in the case of polls conducted by numerous organizations both within and outside of Yugoslavia in 2000, it is merely to be discarded out of hand.
What if the Republicans claimed victory and then destroyed all the ballots before they could be recounted?
Considering this would have had to have been preceded by the Democrats annulling the elections after failing to execute an electoral fraud which would make even Boss Tweed blush, I'm going to simply dismiss this off as more meritless hypothesizing on your part, on par with "What if monkeys flew out of your butt?" and other such interesting questions.
The fact is -- Slobo's thugs didn't detsroy the ballots; DOS's thugs did (remember, they were paid to come from Chachak to mount a demonstration).
The $100M didn't buy the voted -- it bought OTPOR's thugs, spies, quislings, traitors, opportunists, and the like. It bought Legiya's "loyalty" that secured DOS's victory.
The people of Serbia votes gaianst Slobo out of emotion. Most of them had no idea what each party stood for. It was a referendum more than an election, and even then almost half as many Serbs voted for Slobo and his coalition as for the opposition.
Do Serb voters care? Serbs, like all masses, regardless of nationality or religion, are dumb sheep who can be led one way or another. They want something "better." They will turn on the winning parties and switch loyalty in a heartbeat.
Right now, Koshtunitsa is re-creating DOS after voters ousted DOS. Is that not a slap in the face of Serbia's voters? Does anyone care? Not really.
DOs has shows that is it made up of the same genes as those of Miloshevich's regime. The colors are different, the banners are different, but the meat is the same. Slobo chose to resist, and DOS decided to sell out. Neither was successful. Serbia's voters voted for change and got nothing -- once again -- because the Empire stepped in and denied the Serbs voters their will to give someone else a chance. A lesson to the Serbs about Imperial democracy worth remembering.
Koshtunitsa was and is a bad guy because he sided with people whose idea of serving the country is perverse because the country they wish to serve is not Serbia, or that S&M contraption.
He is doing it again, as we write these lines. Last time I checked, Serbia's voters ousted DOS and its quisling scum bags, and Koshtunitsa is rebuilng a coalition with them!
Serbs don't foget and don't forgive -- and anyone claiming diferent doesn't know them. Your quote of Koshtunitsa saying God will forgve the voters but not Slobo is a bit presumptious and outright ignorant.
And you are not too far from that in your twisted mind either -- what I said was that Serbs don't fogive; you are quoting Koshtunitsa as saying God will/will not forgive! Is there a connection? Hello? Your lights are on, but no one is home!
For Koshtunitsa to say something like that only proves that he is yet another idiot Serb politician who has no clue about anything (that's what happens when you live a cage for too long). He may think he is many things, but he is not God's lawyer to have the right to speak on God's behalf or to suggest knowledge of what God will or will not do.
As for a choice among Serbian politicians being poor -- they merely represent a clueless nation that has been isolated for too long by their own doing, and looking in the wrong direction for salvation.
Ahhh.... I figured he had some connections to pro-Milosevic groups.
The only people who miss Milosevic are those who had some type of connections to hios regime.
This point cannot be repeated enough times.
The fact of the matter is, Milosevic dragged the Serbs into a series of wars, none of which were necessary or productive for the Serbian people. Milosevic didn't give a crap about the Serbian people- he only cared about holding on to power.
Unlike the rest of Eastern Europe, which spent the Nineties throwing off the cancer of Communism and building up economies that will allow their people to actually have a future, Serbia spent the nineties being looted and ruined by Milosevic and his cronies.
The fact that people still support him, especially people in this country who should know better, boggles the mind.
Ultimately, Serbia is going to have to save itself, and if doing so requires some temporary alliances of convenience between erstwhile opponents, then so be it - the alternative is merely more of the 1990's and continued disaster for Serbia.
Every time the Serbs waste their opporutnity to vote responsably, they get a band-aid government of recycled failures destined for another failure, and are more likely to vote more radical. We don't want Serbia to turn into another Weimar Republic. We know the outcome of that path.
Let them taste what they ordered. Nothing works better than aversion therapy.
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